


cracking ice

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: cold snap [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU
Genre: Brotherhood, Communication, Family, Fluff, Gen, Leg Injury, Obligation, Snow, but it's hard to be worse than damian, for a value of tim and damian, than doing it on his own account, tim is much better at facilitating that for others, winter weather
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:40:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21783829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: “As if there’s anything special about me doing myduty—”“To me? There is.”And Damian wasn’t sure how to read those words, whether Drake meantit’s specialto methat you did, orliving up to your duty tomeis special, because you usually don’t, or possibly both at once.
Relationships: Tim Drake & Damian Wayne
Series: cold snap [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1569877
Comments: 43
Kudos: 466





	cracking ice

**Author's Note:**

> Hey this isn't really developed/long enough to serve as a full sequel, it's more of an epilogue, but people kept worrying Tim died and otherwise wanting to know what happened after _grasp of ice_ , so in defiance of my brain's insistence that anything I make ought to live up to some ideal of perfection or I shouldn't share it, here is this. Hope it's enjoyable! Happy darkest days of the year!

The clunk-drag of Tim Drake’s leg brace was audible coming up the hall, but turned loud when he stepped into the quiet music room, off the hall carpet onto polished hardwood.

Damian knew he was obvious in the dark room, against the floodlamps lighting up the snow outside. He hadn’t ducked to hide his silhouette when he heard the uneven footsteps coming because he was fairly certain Drake already knew where he was, so it wouldn’t help, and he refused to show weakness.

Now that the useless slob had some basic mobility back, it wasn’t entirely a surprise he’d tracked him down. Damian had been avoiding him entirely for three weeks.

He didn’t turn. Snowflakes outside danced wildly in the tangled air currents created by the house, as it stopped zephyrs dead against its walls and leaked plumes of heat.

Caught in the floodlights they looked impossibly white. Even the new-fallen snow couldn’t compare.

Drake had stopped moving somewhere behind him. Damian tried not to let his shoulders bridle. “What are you looking at?”

“I’m looking at the kid who melted me out of a block of ice,” Drake said, voice oddly mild but with an edge in it, concealed as though under a rim of felt or a layer of water, “and almost died rather than leave me.”

Damian opened his mouth, then closed it again. The snow outside leapt in a sudden down-gust. His voice almost lost itself in the dark, despite the music room’s carefully optimized acoustics, but at least the tone was even. “I thought you had forgotten.”

Drake shook his head, a rustle of too-long hair against shirt collar. “No.”

He came up, clunking softly, to join Damian at the window. “I have a good memory—near death experiences only rarely knock it out.”

“You weren’t _conscious_.”

“It came and went. But every time I woke up, there you were.”

Damian’s fingers curled against the windowsill. “As if there’s anything special about me doing my _duty—”_

“To me? There is.”

And Damian wasn’t sure how to read those words, whether Drake meant _it’s special to **me** that you did_ or _living up to your duty **to me** is special, because you usually don’t,_ or possibly both at once.

“I didn’t do it for you,” Damian grumbled. He leaned forward, to keep Drake out of his peripheral vision and his face out of Drake’s line of sight. His breath fogged the glass. “Grayson would be devastated if you’d been lost in the field, no accounting for taste. And Father would never forgive me.”

“In the middle of the explosions,” Drake said, calmly implacable. “You were holding onto me.”

Judging by the way he said this, it was a fragmentary memory, pieced together from a shattered chronology and recollections of pressure, and the reasoning that he’d only had one usable arm and that had been devoted to the safety line, rather than something he honestly _knew_. Damian wouldn’t be able to sway him from his certainty that he was right, even so.

This was why Damian hated Red Robin _so much_.

“Are you _mocking_ me?” Damian hissed, because he’d been crouching there screaming at fire, ready to die meaninglessly rather than run, completely forgetting about the grapple gun _he himself had placed_ in case of emergency. If he’d remembered, _he_ could have been the one dragging his unwanted adopted brother out of ridiculous lake explosions. _He_ could have been the rescuer.

 _He_ probably wouldn’t have strained his elbow or shoulder nearly as badly, either; he was younger and smaller but he wasn’t weaker and he had also been _conscious_.

“Damian, you _gave me a grapple line._ Your grapple line.” Drake’s hands came up—onto the windowsill, he was leaning on it for support. Mostly the arm that had been frozen, although the other had been out of its sling for days. He couldn’t rest much weight on the knee yet, or for long.

Recovering from surgery always seemed to take longer than from mere stabbings, for some reason, even though the blades in question weren’t wielded with intent to harm. He supposed they got more opportunity to cut deep.

Damian wasn’t going to admit he understood what Drake was trying to say. He had swallowed just now because the dry winter air had left him thirsty, that was all.

“Why is it so important for you to hate me?” Red Robin had tried to ask it calmly, but a thread of emotion came through. Hurt, maybe? Frustration?

Damian hated this inscrutable whinging tagalong, he really did.

“It’s a matter of pride,” he said.

“What _pride?_ Are you just saying you decided to hate me without knowing me, so now you have to stick by it, or admit you might at some point have been wrong?”

Damian turned his head. Drake was standing a little too close—the width of the window and the fact that Damian was standing near the middle of it gave justification. Tim Drake was not a tall man, but he had inches yet on Damian, and was looking down across his own bicep. The cream-coloured sweater he was wearing was too big for him. It was Father’s. “Oh, believe me, I hate you more now that I’ve gotten to know you.”

Drake sighed, and his weight shifted forward a little more on his arms. “Typical.” Then, “You were there the next time I woke up, too.” Shortly before Father and Grayson had arrived to lend support, after hours of improvised emergency care in the Silver Lake Town Fire Hall. Damian had left to go fight weapons smugglers directly Batman’s presence had eventuated, but Red Robin had passed out again by then.

“And you kept turning up in my room for the first two weeks," he went on. "Until I tried to talk to you.”

Ignoring Grayson’s alternately baffled and cooing input on the subject had been one thing, easily done. Brown had been more of a headache, as she liked to pick at issues until she got a response. Pennyworth’s careful _lack_ of comment had been almost worst. Only Father had been reasonable.

Of _course_ Damian had wanted to monitor the course of the fever. It was _his_ rescue that might be rendered redundant.

“Tt. If you were well enough to harass me, you didn’t need my supervision.”

Drake opened his mouth, then closed it again, the crease deepening between his eyebrows. “What did you think I was going to _say?_ ”

He hadn’t been sure. But he hadn’t wanted to find out. Hostility would have been predictable, but would have forced him to choose between throwing the rescue in Drake’s face and committing to the ensuing fight despite Red Robin being too much an invalid to actually attack, or pretending it had never happened and going on as normal, without any recognition of his effort.

A _lack_ of hostility had seemed like it would, somehow, be even worse.

Because what if Drake _was_ respectful and appreciative of all Damian had done and then found out that, at the eleventh hour, Damian had been _saved_ , by his helpless naked idiot rescuee, rather than being the one to save him, and took it all back? There was nothing more humiliating than enjoying praise that, on reflection or further information, the speaker chose to retract.

At some point, even though Damian still hated him, he’d come to care about this bastard’s opinion.

“Look,” said the bastard. “You saved my life. And not while we were under fire together, or coming along on a rescue mission to support somebody else who likes me better. You came looking for me when you didn’t have to, when you could have focused on the fight in front of you and left me to solve my own problems.

"You worked your ass off to keep me from freezing to death, when you didn’t have to. And you didn’t leave me behind, even when as far as you knew I was a dead weight holding you down in a death trap.

“That’s not nothing.”

Drake waited, and when Damian only watched blue shadows on snow, he sighed, and added,

“It doesn’t change everything, either, but…I kind of find myself wanting to forgive you the various murder attempts.”

Damian’s teeth clenched. “That’s your business.” What did he care for forgiveness? It made no difference to _him_ what grudges the pretender held within his heart.

Drake resettled himself against the windowsill, his hips canted against the wall beneath it now, to take even more weight off his feet. Damian should make him go lie down, or at least sit, the idiot. “I guess.”

Damian grimaced at the dancing snowflakes, the long greyscale sweep of the east lawn. His fingers itched for the watercolor brush he was slowly learning how to use properly, instead of for a weapon, and that probably meant something but he didn’t want to consider what.

Finally he glanced sideways. “You aren’t expecting us to actually _get along,_ are you?”

“Gosh no, you infuriating gremlin. We can argue all the time. Just, since you apparently aren’t so opposed to my existence anymore, I thought it would be nice to make peace.”

“Tt.” Back to the winter weather. “You just want me to stop taking your supplies out of your locker.”

“…I would like that, yes. But honestly that’s a level of pranking I can live with, I was on a team with Bart Allen for actual years. It’s mostly annoying because it makes extra work for Alfred.”

Ugh. Guilt. “So if you don’t expect me to be _kind_ to you and you don’t require an end to petty harassment what are you trying to accomplish?”

“…I can’t believe you just called your own behavior petty harassment. Uh. Look. Do you actually want me gone, anymore?”

Drake was annoying. Damian hated him. But there was no war here, anymore; Damian had won it. Robin was his, and Father’s and Grayson’s continued fondness and respect for his predecessor no longer at all threatened to eclipse their regard for Damian himself, or see him expelled, or even distract them from him terribly often. “I suppose I don’t really care.”

“Right. It’s official then. We don’t hate each other. A weight off everyone’s minds.” Drake sounded unsatisfied.

“Do you want me gone?” Damian asked, and then bit his tongue. He didn’t think he’d sounded young, or vulnerable, but to have _asked at all…._

“It’s too late for that now,” Drake told the snow.

Damian hissed in through his teeth. “So you just wish I’d never been born,” he bit out. He could say _and then who would have saved your skin on that lake,_ but in a world with no Damian that mission might never have happened, or Drake might have been on it with a partner who never lost track of him and left him undefended to begin with. That was all Damian was in this moron’s eyes, even now: an inconvenient reality to come to terms with.

“…I mean,” Drake said slowly, “no? I guess not. I’d be better off, in most ways, dying in lakes aside, but…I don’t think Dick would be. And it’s good for Bruce to have a kid around, even one who causes as much stress as you do.”

“Excuse me?”

“If anybody can get Bruce to start showing grey hairs, it’ll be you.”

“Tt.” Father was past fifty, now. It was statistically probable he would start to grey soon, regardless of how much stress he was put under, and if worrying were going to be the thing that started it, he would have a full head of white by now.

“But anyway, I…can’t actually wish you out of existence, at this point.”

Damian folded his arms on the wide windowsill and propped his forehead against the glass, fogging it opaque with his breath. “I’m blown away by your magnanimity.”

It sounded like Drake rolled his eyes, his head going with them, hair sliding against the wood of the window frame. “Shut up, all _you_ said was you don’t care whether I exist or not, and I didn’t even _do_ anything to you. It’s not on me to escalate this positivity train all on my own. I am not the warm fuzzy feelings engine I was at your age, and I wasn’t _that_ good at it even then.”

“Hmph.”

Drake shifted his weight against the wall again. “Hey Damian?”

The tone had changed. Damian couldn’t read it. “Yes?”

“Thanks for not abandoning me to my humiliating naked death.”

“You’re welcome, I suppose.” Damian leaned back and drew a bat-symbol into the fog of his breath with a fingertip. The symmetry was perfect, and all the points were crisp. “So. Truce?”

Drake nodded, the tension seeming to melt out of him, as if this was what he had been seeking all along. “Truce,” he concluded, that satisfied snapping-shut sound his voice took on when he got his way. When Damian glanced over he was entirely plastered against the window and its sill, cheek flat against the cool of the glass, looking bleached and greyish again even accounting for the blanching effect of the floodlight.

Damian abandoned the dance of the snowflakes, grabbed Drake by the back of Father’s sweater, and began to drag him quite unceremoniously toward the dustcloth-swathed chaise behind the piano. If he didn’t obey the pull he would fall over, because there was no way with that brace he could manage any sort of complicated footwork, even to spite Damian.

“Come, you idiot. Sit. Stop wasting all of our hard work.”


End file.
